Taskwarrior & Good Program Design



I was recommended <a href="http://taskwarrior.org/">taskwarrior</a> by Lars, who advertised it as a very cool todo-list manager for the commandline. It's available under <a href="http://www.cygwin.com">cygwin</a> as well. I wanted to give it a try today, so installed it and checked out the <a href="http://taskwarrior.org">taskwarrior homepage</a>. The first thing it does, it leads you to the <a href="http://taskwarrior.org/projects/taskwarrior/wiki/30-second_Tutorial">30 second taskwarrior tutorial</a> where they give you a very tiny set of commands you need to make a todo-list in the most literal sense: A list of things that you have to do. Of course, the program can do much more than that, and I am not even familliar with <i>all</i> of its features. However, at this point already, I want to comment positively on the unusually gentle learning curve it provides, compared to most other Linux tools. This is an aspect of program design often neglected: Do not overwhelm the user, in particular not with features that are <i>optional</i>. I think a great many deal of open source projects could benefit significantly from improvements in that area, because all elitism aside, a large and devoted userbase is the heart and soul of a vivid, open software project.

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